


The Heterodyne Boys and the Beetleburg Waffle Cannon

by savagescribbles (timeandcelery)



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mad Science, Pre-Canon, Waffles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 07:51:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/695958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeandcelery/pseuds/savagescribbles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein the boys attend Transylvania Polygnostic, Klaus cannot hold down a girlfriend, Bill sets out to lift his best friend's spirits, and things go about as well as they can be expected to.</p><p>Which is to say, badly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heterodyne Boys and the Beetleburg Waffle Cannon

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for [Inkwell](http://wulfenbachmanpain.tumblr.com), who is of the opinion that there is not enough terrible first-gen friendshipfic in this fandom. I tend to agree with him.

When Barry walked into the house after his three o’clock class — Advanced Theory of  Humanoid Automata 4 — it was quiet. 

His instinctive reaction was to throw his textbook up in front of his face and carefully peer around it, awaiting the explosion that generally followed such silences.

Instead, he heard a metallic clattering, a liquid squelch, and a shout of “Blast it!” from the direction of the kitchen. He lowered the textbook. 

“…Bill?”

No answer. He put the textbook on the table and headed in the direction of the kitchen, shielding his face with one hand. "Bill?"

Somewhere inside, a faint mechanical clicking had started up. Goggles down. 

“I told you that the oven didn’t need redesigning…” 

The whirring picked up, and he pushed the door open to peer past it cautiously. He’d just determined that Bill was there, alive, and apparently in one piece, when the thing Bill was standing next to made a loud  _whoom_!  and something wet and sticky splattered across his face.

It was, he determined shortly, waffle batter. When he pushed his goggles to the top of his head and squinted, he found that it was all over the kitchen: the walls, the floor, the dismantled appliances, the ceiling. Looking up from the batter-covered wreckage of the coffeemaker, the toaster, and Klaus’s prized waffle iron, he raised an eyebrow at Bill, who grinned.

Barry took a deep breath and counted to ten in his head. “Bill."

"Yes?"

"Is that a  _waffle cannon_?”

“I’m still fine-tuning it! By the time Klaus gets back, it should be able to make —” He paused for a second, calculating, while waffle batter dripped out of his hair. “Three hundred and seventeen plus or minus three waffles per minute, with variable settings for crispness, thickness, and sweetness.” He pointed to a tap attached to the side. “There’s even a topping dispenser!”

A large glob of batter barely missed Barry’s forehead, and, sighing, he trudged across the sticky kitchen to the pantry. “It doesn’t work.”

“I’m not finished yet!” protested Bill. By now he was fiddling with the waffle cannon again. It had begun an ominous dribbling.

“Why did you build this?” Barry asked, staring irritably into the cupboard.

“For Klaus.”

“…Why now?”

“Didn’t you hear?” Bill asked, sounding horribly distressed and dropping his wrench on his foot. “Frieda dumped him!”

Barry had, in fact, heard — not of a dumping, but of a fairly mutual breakup. The story had been related to him over lunch by a Klaus who was not noticeably more morose than usual. Either Bill had heard differently, or Barry was somehow missing, as per usual, the leap of logic that had led to the coating of the kitchen in waffle.

“He’ll be sad! And waffles cheer him up.” Bill stood up again, looking down at the waffle cannon as it whirred to life. He fiddled with a dial, pressed the big red button on top of the cannon, and waited. Nothing happened. “So… I thought a lot of waffles would cheer him up more,” he added, slightly sheepish by now.

“Right.” Barry, done digging around in the disaster of a pantry, shoved a mop in his face.

Bill frowned at it, but before he could protest the injustice of being made to mop when there were perfectly good clanks to do that, keys rattled at the front door and heavy footsteps made their way down the hall. “Bill? Barry? You two alright?”

"He's  _early!"_ said Bill in distress.

The kitchen door opened, and Klaus froze, staring at the two of them.

“Bill — you —  _what_  — is that —”

The waffle cannon whirred and thumped and shot one waffle, baked to perfection, across the room. It ricocheted off the ceiling, hit Klaus’s nose, and dropped into his coat collar.

Bill laughed until he cried.


End file.
